Forget About Anything by Shannon Fandler

Forget About Anything

By Shannon Fandler

That year when I was eighteen, I guess, was the most fucked up my mental health has ever been. There were several reasons, the most damning of which was loneliness. There was also Aristos, who probably never knew how much he killed me. I was a first-year college student, and he worked at a little family-run cafe a couple blocks away from my campus. Supposedly he prepared food and baked pastries, but I’d always see him with his sleeves rolled up, leaning on the counter and talking to customers who, their mouths full of sandwich or coffee, were helpless not to listen to his diatribe. It was nearly constant, his ranting about life in general and particularly about how wasted his talents were in the kitchen of his uncle’s little restaurant, he with his good mind and college degree, but nobody disliked hearing it. The first day he gave me an earful, I chuckled and was a little flattered and walked away not thinking much about him. But it got to where I could see, with my eyes shut, the scarring on the left half of his face—my tongue had traced it into the insides of my cheeks so many times.

“You’re such a baby,” his aunt would yell to him, rushing in and out of the kitchen with some new burn on her hand or dirty trays stuffed under her arm. He was. He had a wide infant gape that he could contort in any way he wanted. When he was upset, his lips were so soft and grimaced that his whole mouth seemed in danger of sliding sideways off his face. But he could also snarl his upper lip tenderly, popping a couple of wet teeth. He was a young forty, then. His aunt loved him and his uncle loved him. They would pay for anything, for him. They didn’t want him to work in their restaurant. When the aunt was not slicing pitas or flash-cooking meat on the giant, deadly skillet in the back, she would slap his rear end with her dish towel or hang on his arm and tell him how wasted he was, standing around wiping the counter all day. His uncle would sometimes hang around shyly smoking and saying things to make Aristos talk. Once, he said, “You going to have children anytime soon? You’re not so young.”

Aristos’s hands flew up in the air. They were covered lightly in black hair. “Crazy,” he said. “What do I need children for? Crazy. In a world filled with pedophiles and predators and nymphomaniacs and whores and Santa Claus and cartoons having sex, why on earth would I need children? Why would I bring children into it?” I laughed, and he flashed a gentle look at me. “You’re a child, what are you, fifteen, sixteen? Why are you laughing? What do you know?” His voice was caressing. I had a second tea that day, just to linger, and while he made it and watched me drink it, he told me everything he knew about bad parenting. “Mothers dressing their little girls like whores. Do you know how you can tell a good mother? Her daughter looks like shit. Socks up to here—” He gestured vaguely at his knees. “Sweatpants, a sweatshirt, all covered up.”

“That’s the kind of mother I had,” I said, and he looked at me very softly.

“Good,” he said. “How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

He was forty, and his wife was thirty-five. She was going to school to be a doctor, and he never talked about her. Sometimes he would preface statements with, “This person that I know…” These statements were loving and vague. If we were talking about a restaurant: “This person I know tried it the other day, and they liked it.” I guessed he didn’t want anyone to know he was married, so he could flirt with the young professional women who came in on their lunch hours. I only knew, because someone or another had told me, that the aunt and uncle were putting the wife through medical school. She wasn’t Greek like Aristos, but a plain-looking light-skinned woman, like me. I don’t know why they did this, for his wife, except that Aristos had a round, pleasant face and liked people and could make pizza. And he was their nephew and so they loved him and gave their money freely to him. Aristos had told me once, half-joking, that the uncle had gotten him a prostitute for his eighteenth birthday, a big, blonde, soft-bodied girl who was about thirty and beautiful. All the men in the family had gone to the whorehouse. This was in Greece, where love was different, he had said, and I told him I was not offended. “But do you really like that kind of girl?” I asked.

“Girls in string bikinis,” he proclaimed, pronouncing “bikinis” with a kind of mocking precision. “Those are my favorite kind of girls, but I’ll take the kind in wool skirts and argyle sweaters too,” he added, because that was what I was wearing as I sat curled up in a booth eating chevre and honey and listening to him talk. I wanted, then, to take his face between my hands, to touch his thin black hair and the brown scalp beneath it. But he was always dancing and beaming a couple of steps away, dangling like a clown on strings.

When I went home for winter break that December, I thought I would be overjoyed to leave school. My roommate was nothing like me and, in fact, was not returning for the spring semester. Winter had seemed to make our room perpetually dark—we were in the back of a half-empty housing overflow center, full of a lot of drafty hallways and frightening bathrooms. Often, I found condoms stuck to the ceilings and vomit in the corners of the elevators.

But at home, my parents were at work all day and I never bothered to clean up after myself. Christmas was a bright spot lasting a couple of days, and then the house was full of shadows again. My old friends were excited but detached. We spent a couple of long evenings drinking and telling all our new stories. It seemed like an endless amount of grasping hands and trying to make each other understand. The people we had met! The things we had done and seen and learned! But each time we fell apart after the crest of a frustrating night, we felt as if we’d been unsuccessful in communicating our adventures, joys, and sorrows. Aristos, the warmth in his eyes and how it was always hot in the café as I sat at my table in the back with my book and my pita and hummus sandwich. How Aristos would sometimes sit on some adjacent table and talk to me for a few minutes. “I shouldn’t be here,” he would say. “I am an investment banker. Top of my graduating class, and top of my field for a little while.” Then he would laugh and thrust a dishcloth down into a glass until it squeaked. “This is why you should study hard,” he said once. “So you can polish the glasses that come out of the dishwasher so that some woman with a husband that cheats on her with his secretary can come in here and get lipstick prints on the rim of it while she tells her lady friends about finding the secretary’s underwear in the husband’s briefcase or the secretary’s lipstick on the husband’s briefs. The state of the glassware, you see, is very important, obviously, in this case.”

“Aristos, you’re insane,” I would say. But I couldn’t tell this to my old friends. What was urgent to me was confusing to them, and I spent the entire winter pining.

When I saw him again at the start of the new semester, I was eating a gyro at an awkward corner table. I had been anxious since I’d walked in. There was a busier crowd in the restaurant, because my classes had changed and I was taking my lunches later. His aunt had barely said hello.

And when he walked in, arguing vehemently with a younger man, I felt like a little girl, far removed from his adulthood and masculinity. Aristos was square-shouldered in a wool pea coat, and had an ugly expression to his mouth. I blushed furiously. I couldn’t eat my sandwich. And when he had finished his argument to his satisfaction, and when he had greeted half the restaurant effusively, and when he had seen me and showered me with his own brand of over-the-top welcoming and flattery, he suddenly noticed the blush and pulled up sharply and asked,

“What’s wrong? Had too much or not enough Christmas?”

“Nothing, a fever,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, if you’re contagious, get the hell out.” And he grinned and slid his hand a little on the table while I stared at his knuckles and clean nails. I had been wondering lately what they would feel like on my scalp or on the soft mound of my stomach.

“This is my cousin Nick,” he remembered to add, gesturing carelessly. And I whispered hello to the thin, dark-skinned man who had come into the restaurant with Aristos. He became a fixture there, quickly. Often, they would pull out a chess board and Nick’s slim fingers would set up all the pieces quietly while Aristos joked and bullshitted with friends. It might be an hour, sometimes, before Aristos would actually sit down to play. But then he wouldn’t speak a word, in his concentration. His brow would darken and his fingers would fist. I would stare at his gold wedding ring resting among the dark hairs, and at the way he seemed volatile, almost furious. I wouldn’t have touched him on the shoulder to get his attention if the restaurant had been on fire—I would have thought he might strike me and send me reeling across the floor. It was in contexts like this that I felt Aristos was different with me than he was with others, that he played with me the role of the fun uncle or jovial older brother and that with other men he was graver, modulated, softer-spoken but more imposing. One afternoon I saw him and his cousin fixing a car, Aristos lying on the ground without a coat, his arms and chest straining against the fabric of his shirt as he wrestled in the underbelly of the vehicle. And again I felt locked out of his world, as if I were not worthy even to say hello. At these times I wanted almost to be a man, so that I could be his friend. I imagined hugging him after the car engine had turned over successfully, I imagined touching his back and saying, “Shit, man, we did it, let’s get a drink.” I wanted to sit in a bar with him and hear his stories and inhale his beery sweat and breath, a strange but ultimate kind of intimacy.

When the spring term threatened to end, with finals only a week away, I felt as though I couldn’t leave. I begged my parents to allow me to enroll in the first abbreviated summer semester. It was just two classes, British Literature and Art History, for five short weeks. So after finals, I returned home only to move back to school a couple of weeks later, with my summer clothes in two suitcases. And when I returned, Aristos was on an extended vacation to Mexico. His aunt, bending over the cash register drawer to count out my change for an iced tea, told me she didn’t know when he would be back. “On account of the women and the mojitos and everything being cheap,” she said, rolling her eyes. His wife was, apparently, in an internship and not accompanying him. And for the rest of the five weeks, I felt like my chest wall had collapsed, crushing my throat and causing me to breathe shallowly. I muddled through the two classes as best I could, and spent my extra time walking idly around the mostly-empty campus, vowing never again to experience summer in a college town. It was like losing a god.

And the next year, family and friends convinced me to transfer back home. I slept in my own room and went to classes and worked part time at a video store. I graduated punctually and had a few different jobs and a boyfriend who, during one of many conversations about where we’d been and whom we’d known before we met each other, laughed about Aristos and said,

“He was probably in the Greek mob. That’s where he got his money.” And I had another boyfriend after that one who had actually been to the restaurant, and vaguely knew the aunt and uncle, such were the narrow boundaries of my world. Everyone I knew, knew each other. And we all thought the same things and had been to the same places, which was why I no longer knew Aristos. Because he had been everywhere and knew people I couldn’t imagine. Though now, I guess, he’s lost the rest of his hair and is bitterer, maybe more complaining.

But what I still hold on to, years later, was a day in February, a freezing day, when he had followed me out of the restaurant and a little ways up the street. Our breath was visible in the air. There weren’t many people around because it was so cold, and he grabbed my throat and kissed me roughly against the wall of the consignment shop next to a window display of mannequins in shabby coats. My hair caught in the bricks and jerked out of my scalp. When he strode on wordlessly up the street, there was a little kick to his step, but when he turned the corner, I saw that his profile was businesslike. He wasn’t even smiling.

After that, he started wearing glasses. One day, he brought a six hundred dollar bottle of vodka into the restaurant, explaining to everyone who was there about the little Russian town it had come from, and the purity of the taste. “Like snow off a mountain,” he said.

“Get the hell out of my restaurant,” the uncle said. “You don’t bring a six hundred dollar bottle of vodka here, where there are working people. A fucking waste of money!”

“You know what’s wasted?” cried Aristos, slamming the bottle down on my table and flinging himself into the booth across from me. “I am. Fucking wasted.” He wasn’t really mad. And, in the moments before his uncle came over to forgive him, he put his head close to mine and told me how he would take me, some day, to the little Russian village where, holed up in a hotel he knew of there, we would eat the very best liquor-filled chocolates in the world, so good they would make you forget about anything.

Shannon Fandler is a junior English major at Cabrini College in Radnor, PA.


	Forget About Anything By Shannon Fandler That year when I was eighteen, I guess, was the most fucked up my mental health has ever been. There were several reasons, the most damning of which was loneliness. There was also Aristos, who probably never knew how much he killed me. I was a first-year college student, and he worked at a little family-run cafe a couple blocks away from my campus. Supposedly he prepared food and baked pastries, but I’d always see him with his sleeves rolled up, leaning on the counter and talking to customers who, their mouths full of sandwich or coffee, were helpless not to listen to his diatribe. It was nearly constant, his ranting about life in general and particularly about how wasted his talents were in the kitchen of his uncle’s little restaurant, he with his good mind and college degree, but nobody disliked hearing it. The first day he gave me an earful, I chuckled and was a little flattered and walked away not thinking much about him. But it got to where I could see, with my eyes shut, the scarring on the left half of his face—my tongue had traced it into the insides of my cheeks so many times. “You’re such a baby,” his aunt would yell to him, rushing in and out of the kitchen with some new burn on her hand or dirty trays stuffed under her arm. He was. He had a wide infant gape that he could contort in any way he wanted. When he was upset, his lips were so soft and grimaced that his whole mouth seemed in danger of sliding sideways off his face. But he could also snarl his upper lip tenderly, popping a couple of wet teeth. He was a young forty, then. His aunt loved him and his uncle loved him. They would pay for anything, for him. They didn’t want him to work in their restaurant. When the aunt was not slicing pitas or flash-cooking meat on the giant, deadly skillet in the back, she would slap his rear end with her dish towel or hang on his arm and tell him how wasted he was, standing around wiping the counter all day. His uncle would sometimes hang around shyly smoking and saying things to make Aristos talk. Once, he said, “You going to have children anytime soon? You’re not so young.” Aristos’s hands flew up in the air. They were covered lightly in black hair. “Crazy,” he said. “What do I need children for? Crazy. In a world filled with pedophiles and predators and nymphomaniacs and whores and Santa Claus and cartoons having sex, why on earth would I need children? Why would I bring children into it?” I laughed, and he flashed a gentle look at me. “You’re a child, what are you, fifteen, sixteen? Why are you laughing? What do you know?” His voice was caressing. I had a second tea that day, just to linger, and while he made it and watched me drink it, he told me everything he knew about bad parenting. “Mothers dressing their little girls like whores. Do you know how you can tell a good mother? Her daughter looks like shit. Socks up to here—” He gestured vaguely at his knees. “Sweatpants, a sweatshirt, all covered up.” “That’s the kind of mother I had,” I said, and he looked at me very softly. “Good,” he said. “How old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen?” He was forty, and his wife was thirty-five. She was going to school to be a doctor, and he never talked about her. Sometimes he would preface statements with, “This person that I know…” These statements were loving and vague. If we were talking about a restaurant: “This person I know tried it the other day, and they liked it.” I guessed he didn’t want anyone to know he was married, so he could flirt with the young professional women who came in on their lunch hours. I only knew, because someone or another had told me, that the aunt and uncle were putting the wife through medical school. She wasn’t Greek like Aristos, but a plain-looking light-skinned woman, like me. I don’t know why they did this, for his wife, except that Aristos had a round, pleasant face and liked people and could make pizza. And he was their nephew and so they loved him and gave their money freely to him. Aristos had told me once, half-joking, that the uncle had gotten him a prostitute for his eighteenth birthday, a big, blonde, soft-bodied girl who was about thirty and beautiful. All the men in the family had gone to the whorehouse. This was in Greece, where love was different, he had said, and I told him I was not offended. “But do you really like that kind of girl?” I asked. “Girls in string bikinis,” he proclaimed, pronouncing “bikinis” with a kind of mocking precision. “Those are my favorite kind of girls, but I’ll take the kind in wool skirts and argyle sweaters too,” he added, because that was what I was wearing as I sat curled up in a booth eating chevre and honey and listening to him talk. I wanted, then, to take his face between my hands, to touch his thin black hair and the brown scalp beneath it. But he was always dancing and beaming a couple of steps away, dangling like a clown on strings. When I went home for winter break that December, I thought I would be overjoyed to leave school. My roommate was nothing like me and, in fact, was not returning for the spring semester. Winter had seemed to make our room perpetually dark—we were in the back of a half-empty housing overflow center, full of a lot of drafty hallways and frightening bathrooms. Often, I found condoms stuck to the ceilings and vomit in the corners of the elevators. But at home, my parents were at work all day and I never bothered to clean up after myself. Christmas was a bright spot lasting a couple of days, and then the house was full of shadows again. My old friends were excited but detached. We spent a couple of long evenings drinking and telling all our new stories. It seemed like an endless amount of grasping hands and trying to make each other understand. The people we had met! The things we had done and seen and learned! But each time we fell apart after the crest of a frustrating night, we felt as if we’d been unsuccessful in communicating our adventures, joys, and sorrows. Aristos, the warmth in his eyes and how it was always hot in the café as I sat at my table in the back with my book and my pita and hummus sandwich. How Aristos would sometimes sit on some adjacent table and talk to me for a few minutes. “I shouldn’t be here,” he would say. “I am an investment banker. Top of my graduating class, and top of my field for a little while.” Then he would laugh and thrust a dishcloth down into a glass until it squeaked. “This is why you should study hard,” he said once. “So you can polish the glasses that come out of the dishwasher so that some woman with a husband that cheats on her with his secretary can come in here and get lipstick prints on the rim of it while she tells her lady friends about finding the secretary’s underwear in the husband’s briefcase or the secretary’s lipstick on the husband’s briefs. The state of the glassware, you see, is very important, obviously, in this case.” “Aristos, you’re insane,” I would say. But I couldn’t tell this to my old friends. What was urgent to me was confusing to them, and I spent the entire winter pining. When I saw him again at the start of the new semester, I was eating a gyro at an awkward corner table. I had been anxious since I’d walked in. There was a busier crowd in the restaurant, because my classes had changed and I was taking my lunches later. His aunt had barely said hello. And when he walked in, arguing vehemently with a younger man, I felt like a little girl, far removed from his adulthood and masculinity. Aristos was square-shouldered in a wool pea coat, and had an ugly expression to his mouth. I blushed furiously. I couldn’t eat my sandwich. And when he had finished his argument to his satisfaction, and when he had greeted half the restaurant effusively, and when he had seen me and showered me with his own brand of over-the-top welcoming and flattery, he suddenly noticed the blush and pulled up sharply and asked, “What’s wrong? Had too much or not enough Christmas?” “Nothing, a fever,” I said. “Oh,” he said. “Well, if you’re contagious, get the hell out.” And he grinned and slid his hand a little on the table while I stared at his knuckles and clean nails. I had been wondering lately what they would feel like on my scalp or on the soft mound of my stomach. “This is my cousin Nick,” he remembered to add, gesturing carelessly. And I whispered hello to the thin, dark-skinned man who had come into the restaurant with Aristos. He became a fixture there, quickly. Often, they would pull out a chess board and Nick’s slim fingers would set up all the pieces quietly while Aristos joked and bullshitted with friends. It might be an hour, sometimes, before Aristos would actually sit down to play. But then he wouldn’t speak a word, in his concentration. His brow would darken and his fingers would fist. I would stare at his gold wedding ring resting among the dark hairs, and at the way he seemed volatile, almost furious. I wouldn’t have touched him on the shoulder to get his attention if the restaurant had been on fire—I would have thought he might strike me and send me reeling across the floor. It was in contexts like this that I felt Aristos was different with me than he was with others, that he played with me the role of the fun uncle or jovial older brother and that with other men he was graver, modulated, softer-spoken but more imposing. One afternoon I saw him and his cousin fixing a car, Aristos lying on the ground without a coat, his arms and chest straining against the fabric of his shirt as he wrestled in the underbelly of the vehicle. And again I felt locked out of his world, as if I were not worthy even to say hello. At these times I wanted almost to be a man, so that I could be his friend. I imagined hugging him after the car engine had turned over successfully, I imagined touching his back and saying, “Shit, man, we did it, let’s get a drink.” I wanted to sit in a bar with him and hear his stories and inhale his beery sweat and breath, a strange but ultimate kind of intimacy. When the spring term threatened to end, with finals only a week away, I felt as though I couldn’t leave. I begged my parents to allow me to enroll in the first abbreviated summer semester. It was just two classes, British Literature and Art History, for five short weeks. So after finals, I returned home only to move back to school a couple of weeks later, with my summer clothes in two suitcases. And when I returned, Aristos was on an extended vacation to Mexico. His aunt, bending over the cash register drawer to count out my change for an iced tea, told me she didn’t know when he would be back. “On account of the women and the mojitos and everything being cheap,” she said, rolling her eyes. His wife was, apparently, in an internship and not accompanying him. And for the rest of the five weeks, I felt like my chest wall had collapsed, crushing my throat and causing me to breathe shallowly. I muddled through the two classes as best I could, and spent my extra time walking idly around the mostly-empty campus, vowing never again to experience summer in a college town. It was like losing a god. And the next year, family and friends convinced me to transfer back home. I slept in my own room and went to classes and worked part time at a video store. I graduated punctually and had a few different jobs and a boyfriend who, during one of many conversations about where we’d been and whom we’d known before we met each other, laughed about Aristos and said, “He was probably in the Greek mob. That’s where he got his money.” And I had another boyfriend after that one who had actually been to the restaurant, and vaguely knew the aunt and uncle, such were the narrow boundaries of my world. Everyone I knew, knew each other. And we all thought the same things and had been to the same places, which was why I no longer knew Aristos. Because he had been everywhere and knew people I couldn’t imagine. Though now, I guess, he’s lost the rest of his hair and is bitterer, maybe more complaining. But what I still hold on to, years later, was a day in February, a freezing day, when he had followed me out of the restaurant and a little ways up the street. Our breath was visible in the air. There weren’t many people around because it was so cold, and he grabbed my throat and kissed me roughly against the wall of the consignment shop next to a window display of mannequins in shabby coats. My hair caught in the bricks and jerked out of my scalp. When he strode on wordlessly up the street, there was a little kick to his step, but when he turned the corner, I saw that his profile was businesslike. He wasn’t even smiling. After that, he started wearing glasses. One day, he brought a six hundred dollar bottle of vodka into the restaurant, explaining to everyone who was there about the little Russian town it had come from, and the purity of the taste. “Like snow off a mountain,” he said. “Get the hell out of my restaurant,” the uncle said. “You don’t bring a six hundred dollar bottle of vodka here, where there are working people. A fucking waste of money!” “You know what’s wasted?” cried Aristos, slamming the bottle down on my table and flinging himself into the booth across from me. “I am. Fucking wasted.” He wasn’t really mad. And, in the moments before his uncle came over to forgive him, he put his head close to mine and told me how he would take me, some day, to the little Russian village where, holed up in a hotel he knew of there, we would eat the very best liquor-filled chocolates in the world, so good they would make you forget about anything. Shannon Fandler is a junior English major at Cabrini College in Radnor, PA.